National Poetry Month Recap

“Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time,
but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.”
–T.S. Eliot

April was National Poetry Month, and over the past month we showcased a number of our poets, including our T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winners.

Below are a few of the poets, and their poetry collections, that we featured this past month. Clink on the title to connect to the book’s page on our website.

Because I Cannot Leave This Body by Carol V. Davis was published in 2017. She is twice a Fulbright Scholar in Russia and has published two other poetry collections with TSUP, along with her collection Because I Cannot Leave This Body. One of those collections, Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg, won the 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Davis’ poetry has been highly praised and read on such outlets as NPR and Russia Radio.

Featured Poem: “What Followed” from Because I Cannot Leave This Body

Mud Song by Terry Ann Thaxton was the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner for 2017. This poetry collection was also awarded the 2017 Florida Poetry Book Review silver medal. She is a professor of English at the University of Central Florida in Orlando where she teaches creative writing and serves as the MFA Program Director. She has also published two previous collections of poetry: Getaway Girl and The Terrible Wife, which won the 2014 Florida Book Award Bronze Medal.

Featured Poem: “Arbor Day, 4th Grade” from Mud Song

Alison D. Moncrief Bromage’s poetry collection Daughter, Daedalus was the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, and other literary magazines. She holds an MFA from New York University and is currently a writing tutor at Yale University.

Featured Poem: “Daughter, At the edge of the yard” from Daughter, Daedalus

Laura Bylenok’s poetry collection Warp was the 2015 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner. Her poetry can be found in Pleiades, North American Review, Guernica, Cimarron Review, and West Branch, among other journals. Warp was the Best Book Award’s 2016 “Poetry” Category Award-Winner and a finalist for Foreword Review’s 2015 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award for Poetry (Nonfiction).

Featured Poem: “Parallax” from Warp

Mona Lisa Saloy’s poetry collection Red Beans and Ricely Yours was the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner. Saloy’s collection was also the winner of the 2006 Annual PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award for Poetry. Her award-winning poetry collection is composed of narrative poems that celebrate the day-to-day lives of Black New Orleans.

Featured Poem: “A Few Words on My Words” from Red Beans and Ricely Yours

Born in Athens in 1928, Titos Patrikios was a member of the intellectual left of post-war Greece, surviving imprisonment, hard labor, censorship, and exile. Patrikios went on to publish five collections of poetry and three books of prose. His poetry collection The Lions’ Gatefocuses on Patrikios’ hardships and defiance. While his poetry is well known and widely translated in Europe, this collection represents the most complete publication of his work in English, translated by Christopher Bakken and Roula Konsolaki.

Featured Poem: “Ashes” from Lions’ Gate

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"The Beginner’s Cow: Memories of a Volga German from Kansas" by Loren Schmidtberger— At the age of seven, Loren Schmidtberger was assigned to a beginner’s cow—the gentlest cow in the herd and the easiest for a child just beginning to milk. As he learned to milk with the help of the cow, he also learned the art of living from the unforgiving reality of the Dust Bowl years tempered by the steadfast resilience of his Volga German community.